There are these moments when I look at you, and I wish I could capture you. Put this memory away so that one, five, fifteen years from now, I can pull it out like something rustled in the tissue paper of shivering wings and unwrapped with a crinkle whisper.

Kept like some sort of incorruptible secret I'd never have to share. What our pressed palms feel like, the lines of my life intersecting, bisecting, hemisecting against yours. Me looking at you looking at me looking at you. The light. The shadows. The sound of a sigh that leaves you fulfilled even as it empties. The smell, which will lie unbidden until it's later released with a euphoria of inexplicable nostalgia that carries the feeling even if not the image.

What could I do in this moment? I want to hold it close even as it susurrates out of my fingers. It's like tripping toward fog, trying to fly through it, only to have it disappear the closer you draw to it

It's an impossibility, and the sadness of that reality savors of happiness too.

Because it's something I hesitate to even put into words. This is you and this is me and nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of man. Putting it into words makes it accessible. Something tangible that can now be used to explain another relationship, another time, another moment in the future. And that's not what this is.

This is a moment. Passing. Brief. Never to occur again. It's not even fully yours or mine or ours. But it could never belong to anyone else except us. It's a gift of a moment we're allowed to experience only because we have to release it immediately.

And the devastating beauty of entropic evanescence is that as it ends here's another moment. Another. Another. Each coalescing, each slightly different. Each one worthy of reverence but not in supplication of it. Each moment singular and yet blurring together to create a zoetropic flutter of this time I have with you.